Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

I'm Stephen Sacker, host of the BBC's Hard Talk podcast,

where you can hear in-depth hard-hitting interviews with newsmaking personalities.

Over the years on this program, we've spoken to a number of people who've put their careers,

their personal lives, and freedom at risk to reveal secrets. We know them as whistleblowers.

They've taken on governments and corporations.

They've displayed extraordinary defiance in the face of power.

For some it's meant isolation, persecution and imprisonment.

So what motivates individuals to break codes of silence whatever the cost.

Well, Julian Assange is probably the most famous recent whistleblower.

He's just regained his freedom after pleading guilty to a single charge of

conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information. He'd spent a

dozen years in isolation. seven years hold up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London,

and then five years in a high security UK prison, his alleged crime, publishing the so-called WikiLeaks papers.

Thousands of pages of classified information, including some that exposed ugly truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US government argued that the leaks endangered intelligence

operatives in the field,

an accusation that Assange and his team have always denied.

But how did Assange get these secret papers?

Well, they were sent to him by a low-level US intelligence operative called Bradley now Chelsea Manning and in

2022 I spoke to her.

Is it on your conscience that these names you didn't sift the information it turns out you

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